I'm pleased to announce that Emma Morgenstern has won the Terry B. Heled Travel & Research Grant at the Kelly Writers House. We received dozens of fine applications.Emma (class of 2010) is majoring in Linguistics. She has been published in The Boston Globe Magazine and Penn's own F-Word. Emma is also founder and editor-in-chief of Penn Appetit, Penn's first-ever and only student-run and -written magazine of food writing. Emma has also participated in the Penn Reading Initiative at Huey Elementary School.
Enabled by this grant, Emma will travel to Greece and Turkey to research and conduct interviews with the Jews of Thessaloniki and Istanbul, to learn about their culture, customs and linguistic behavior. She hopes to learn how being the member of a religious and ethnic minority affects attitudes toward religious, ethnic, and linguistic heritage. She will present her writing next fall at the Writers House.
As a way of memorializing her mother, Terry B. Heled, and of honoring the students of her alma mater in gratitude for the encouragement her own research and writing received while she was at Penn, Mali Heled Kinberg (C'95) has created this endowed fund at the Kelly Writers House that, each summer, will enable a student to travel for the purpose of conducting the research that will lead to a significant writing project.
For more about the Heled Grant, see:
writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/awards/heled.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
